I Used to Live Here Once by Jean Rhys - Analysis

Throughout history there has been 450 school shootings in America. Since 1840, there has only been eight school shootings in Alabama. The book I read was about a school shooting in Alabama, in a small high town called Opportunity. This book was called, This Is Where It Ends. Marieke Nijkamp is the author of this book, and published it January 5th, 2016.

To live deliberately is to study one’s self, and live with purpose and intention. Living deliberately means living consciously, we should attempt to learn everything possible from our environment and the people around us. Living deliberately is the opposite of living passively. One must realize they have the choice to do as they please at any given moment and must not live out of habit. Making active decisions is a key defining point of living deliberately. Into the Wild’s Chris McCandless lived deliberately by living on the edge of society, gaining new knowledge from nature and the people around him, and fulfilling his overall purpose with a simple life.

Not everyone is a criminal just because they have a criminal past. People can change through time and experience. Individuals are capable to recognize this through pieces of writing which shows the characters from the beginning through the end. In We Were Here written by Matt de La Pena in 2009, there were three main characters which are Miguel, Mong, and Rondell. Miguel committed a horrible crime and got sent to a group home for a year and was obligated to write in his journal, so the judge can understand his way of his thinking. Miguel meets Rondell and Mong at the group home. Then Mong decides to come up with a plan to escape the group home, run off to Mexico to be free with Miguel and Rondell. The three boys did not know each other that well, they were basically strangers who eventually became best friends threw their journey of escaping to Mexico. In We Were Here shows a major theme which a theme is the moral of the story. Within that journey ,Matt de La Pena, the author of We Were Here shows symbolism which created the theme even though you might have a bad past everyone has the chance to change.

During Mr. Rosenberg’s leave we learned different dramatic elements such as script analysis, stasis and intrusion, dramatic conflict, etc. This helps us to understand the different elements so one day when we have to apply the elements we will already be mindful of them. Additionally, we also learned about the beginning of theater dating back to ancient Greece and their different ways of displaying theater.

The poem “Between the World and Me” by Richard Wright reanimates the horrible scene of a racial lynching and forces the reader to endure the victim's pain through the first person’s narrative voice. The poem contains structured lines and visual division into three stanzas. Moreover, there is one more type of division in the poem. The author uses an ellipsis four times throughout the poem. This punctuation mark frames the poem into the timeline, where the historical past of the African American poet becomes the present experience of any human, despite the race. The climax of the poem is presented in the middle of stanza two. The animated moment, which starts from the sentence “the ground gripped my feet”, dramatically shifts the

Throughout the course of the book, A Long Way Home, Saroo Brierley, the author, encounters a series of traumatic experiences that lead to bittersweet moments. Unlike a normal child’s infancy, Saroo was physically and mentally consuming. Through his experience, we are able to get a glimpse of the many struggles and hardships young children live in India daily. His petrifying experiences of living on the streets, Liluah, and Nava Jeevan finally lead to his safe haven of being taken by the Brierley’s.

Billie Jo Kelby is not a boy. She’s a girl; a wiry, thin, redheaded girl that looks more like her father than her mother. She lives on the Great Plains in 1935, during the great drought known as the Dust Bowl. She lives with her pregnant mother and her father, and life seems good, or as good as it will get in her dusty world.

Authors often create texts that share common themes to teach readers importance of certain aspects and hardships of life. Theme may be expressed through an author’s use of rhetorical devices and many other contributing factors such as figurative language and repetition. The essay, “Once More to the Lake” written by E.B. White and the poem “Forgetfulness” written by Billy Collins, both contain a theme of identity loss. In “Once More to the Lake” E.B White connects to a lake at young age and when returning with his son years later is unable to identify himself. In similar theme “Forgetfulness” describes different factors of human life and everyday things being forgotten and lost. Both White and Collins use repetition and metaphors to further push the theme of identity loss throughout the texts.

In chapter 2 entitled “Living is for Everyone,” Davidson presents Jimmy Teyechea, a cancer fighter who has shown the readers an important yet neglected issue of the life on the border. The health problems found among the people who live in the borderland has raised questions of industrial contaminations since various cases of cancer happened. The waste disposal from the factories has apparently become a big issue and the fact that “properly disposing hazardous waste cost several hundred dollars a barrel” (62) opens an interstice to some irresponsible acts which in the long run pollute the environment and affect people’s health. With LIFE, an organization he formed with other cancer victim, Jimmy tries to look for the answer of the mystery within

She tells of the feeling of shame which emerge from not even having a bed throughout her entire childhood (3). She does reassure that she has the security of her family being the only constant in her life, “Close and sweet and loving. Lucky me on my small pallet on the floor” (4). Travelling every summer “We never knew from one day to the next, from one year to the next, where we would go or live or what we would do” (127), her security of her family seemed always there “Having lived in other people’s houses, barns, and in migrant housing in various stages of decay and repair, it felt as though we could make a home out of anything” (99).

In this article the author, Howard Rheingold, describes his experience when he decided to visit the amish communities. There he discussed why they put self-imposed rules upon themselves. He realized it was not because they resented technology, the Amish love fancy barbeques and electric saws, but they saw that in the “english” world, people are being separated from their community. The amish decided they would try their hardest to avoid this separation caused by technological advances, “Look Who's Talking” by Howard Rheingold, convinces the reader to analyze the pros and cons of technology; to decide whether or not certain devices are beneficial towards people and their community.

In the prologue, Audre describes her “home” as being a place that could only be from a fairy tale (enchanted even). This home is somewhere Lorde never visited or never observed. She only knows this extraordinary place through her mother’s stories. As Audre grows older, “home” is something she does not have in life. She even expresses that the extraordinary place (Carriacou) from her mother’s stories in no longer the home, she longed for it to be (Zami 256). Even though her home was in Harlem, New York, Stamford, and Cuernavaca, they never felt like home. Throughout the novel, it appears that Carriacou helped Audre deal with the racist society. She finally accepts her character in society as a black lesbian. She in time grows to admit that

Jean Rhys’ “I Used to Live Here Once” is a very well written and thought through short story. Rhy is very descriptive about all of the surroundings in the story. She makes sure to leave out no details regardless if the reader realizes it or not. That is why I say Jean Rhys’ “I Used to Live Here Once” is not about where “she” use to live, it is about a woman remembering the first time she knew that she was dead.

       As the tale begins we immediately can sympathize with the repressive plight of the protagonist.  Her romantic imagination is obvious as she describes the "hereditary estate" (Gilman, Wallpaper 170) or the "haunted house" (170) as she would like it to be.  She tells us of her husband, John, who "scoffs" (170) at her romantic sentiments and is "practical to the extreme" (170).  However, in a time

Teju Cole’s phenomenally written original novel majorly takes place in New York City. Cole character was easy to relate to because of his Nigerian American decent being that I am a Ghanaian American. Cole is a Nigerian American. He was born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria and came to the United States in 1992 at the age of seventeen. Cole is also well educated and is a graduate student at Columbia University. I found it insightful how in the novel Cole met several various types of people, including other immigrants. He met and shared stories with a Haitian shoe shiner, at work in Penn Station; a Liberian, imprisoned for over two years in a dentition center in Queens; and a Moroccan student working at an Internet café. I enjoyed the fact that the narrator was well stocked minded. He touched on the topics of art, music, and interesting books. He had a very eclectic set of interest.